16 January 2006

OSSS: Open Source Software in Syria

This story about the use of free software in Syria pairs up nicely with the one about Nigeria I discussed a few days ago. The difference is that where those in Nigeria see open source as a better option than proprietary software, Syrian users of free software have no choice. Politics meets programming, yet again.

Fighting DRM - Digital Rights Minimisation

The National Consumer Council sounds like one of those nebulous bodies full of the occasional sound and fury, but signifying not a lot. To prove otherwise, the NCC has issued a surprisingly switched-on call for new laws to protect consumers' rights to digital content.

The problem centres around Digital Rights Management (DRM). This is one of the great misnomers of our time, since it is about taking away rights - ours - and giving a disproportionate amount of control to the owners of creative materials (note: to the owners, not the creators, who rarely get much benefit from these schemes). Digital Rights Minimisation would be a better description.

You can read the full report, which is mercifully short and easy to understand. Well, it was written for submission to an all-party group of politicians....

Fab Firefox Figures

The Fox just keeps on flying.

Latest figures from the French research company Xiti show that across Europe Firefox now commands 20% of the browser market. The even-better news: weekday usage nearly matches weekend use, suggesting that businesses are big converts, too. The bad news: the UK lags miserably, with just 11% usage. Come on, what's wrong with you lot?

15 January 2006

On Social Bookmarking, Spam - and Steganography

A fine analysis of the threats posed to social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, digg.com etc) from Alex Bosworth. But for me, the real corker is his idea of steganographic spam.

Steganography involves hiding something in a message so that it is not even apparent there is hidden content - unlike cryptography, where the content is obscured but its presence is obvious. This might be achieved by hiding a message in the pixels of a picture - few enough for their presence not to be obvious to casual observers - that can be extracted using the appropriate software running the right algorithms.

Bosworth would have us imagine steganographic spam - so subtle, we are not even aware that it is there. Fiendish.

Who Needs Software Patents?

Not my question, but that of Sir Robin Jacob, a judge at the U.K.'s Court of Appeal who specializes in intellectual-property law, during a seminar he gave. What's amazing is not that he framed it, but that the points he raises are so spot on. It gives you renewed hope for the judiciary.

Oh, the Irony

It seems a reporter working on a dead-tree newspaper has been dismissed because his

Stories contained phrases or sentences that appeared elsewhere before being included, un-attributed, in stories that ran in the Star-Bulletin. The stories did not include inaccurate information or any fabrications.

The phrases and sentences apparently came from Wikipedia, which also detected the borrowings.

Of course, this is precisely what open content is for. If the newspaper article had been available under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), with a link or two, everything would have been fine. Maybe there's a lesson for the newspaper as well as the journalist.

One More Reason for Open Source

Among the many reasons for choosing open source software, one that is often overlooked is that it is much harder to hide things in code that can be inspected. There's bound to be some hacker somewhere with too much time on his/her hands who will take a look at the source code (and make sure that the source code compiles into the binary provided).

This makes adware/spyware far less of a problem for open source code than for your usual binary blob of freeware/shareware, which might contain anything. Anyone who is tempted to download some of the latter may care to peruse this report first. Then go and find some open source instead.

Microsoft's Next Desperation?

One indication of Microsoft's inability to handle the threat of the free software model is that fact that it keeps changing its strategy.

Back in 1999, it tried to show that Windows was more powerful than comparable GNU/Linux systems. It commissioned some research from a company called Mindcraft, which showed that Windows was indeed faster for many tasks. There were bitter arguments about the validity of these tests and their results, and several re-runs as each side tried to bolster its own position.

But what is interesting about this episode is that the weaknesses that were exposed in the GNU/Linux system were simply fed into the development process and fixed in the next release. This indicates one of the great strengths of open source. Solving problems is just a matter of skill; what is hard is pinning them down in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft did the Linux community a huge favour by spending lots of money finding the weak areas of its rival, which were then fixed.

Since GNU/Linux was soon manifestly as good as Windows in terms of performance, Microsoft was forced to change tack. In June 2001, Steve Ballmer famously told the Chicago Sun-Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". However, the business world was clearly less impressed by Ballmer's verbal tantrums than the his sales teams, and the outburst backfired badly. It merely showed Microsoft to be running scared.

More recently, the company has apparently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the free software world - a recognition of the fact that its customers are using it. But clearly, in closed rooms around the company, it is still searching desperately for something it can against open source.

One emerging tack was evident in a fascinating article that appeared in a magazine aimed at Microsoft Certified Professionals. In it, there was a glimpse into how the Microsoft world views the free software threat. Of particular note is the assertion that "Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D", and that "nobody in the Linux world" does anything comparable. The implication would seem to be that Microsoft is therefore a hotbed of creativity and innovation, whereas all free software can do is limp along with tired old tricks.

An extensive and thorough debunking of this assertion came from D C Parris in LXer. All the points he raises are good ones, but I'd like to focus on one in particular.

The statement that Microsoft is serious spending sums on research is true: you only have to look at Microsoft's Research division to see the wide range of work going on. Moreover, to Microsoft' credit, much of this work is made freely available in the form of published papers.

But the second part of the argument - that open source companies taken together spend nowhere near as much as Microsoft - is specious. The whole point about free software is that it represents the communal efforts of thousands of people around the world, most of whom receive no remuneration for their work. Indeed, money probably couldn't even buy the kind of obsessive attention to detail they routinely provide: it comes from passion not payment.

The new argument that the quotation from the above article is putting about comes down to this: that something given freely is worth nothing. In a way, this is the fundamental error that those who do not understand the open world make. In fact, the issue is much larger, and goes to the root of most of the key problems facing the world today. Which is why the "opens" - open source, open genomics, open content and all the cognate approaches - are so crucial: they lie at the heart of solving those same problems.

12 January 2006

Chile Turns up the Heat on WIPO

Good to see another country standing up for open content/public domain (via Open Access News). One of the key issues in tackling the unbalanced nature of the current copyright/patent laws is getting the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) to recognise that its job is bigger than simply protecting today's IP fatcats.

Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org Are Go

Version 1.5 of the open source email client Thunderbird is now available for download. This is a major release of an important program, even if it tends to be overshadowed by its bigger sibling, Firefox.

Thunderbird matters because it forms part of the key trio of browser, email and office suite that together satisfy the vast bulk of general users' computing needs. Now that Firefox is widely accepted as the best browser around, and with OpenOffice.org 2.0 increasingly seen as on a par with Microsoft Office, the only missing piece of the (small) jigsaw puzzle is email.

Like the other two, Thunderbird is available for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux. This platform-independence means that users can start using the three programs on Windows or Macintosh, say, and then be discreetly slid across to running them on GNU/Linux when they are ready. They probably won't even notice.

I've been running Thunderbird for some time now, and I find it powerful yet easy to use. It's got intelligent spam-filtering built in, and takes a safe approach to displaying dodgy images and attachments. It works with POP3, IMAP, Gmail and other email services, so there's no excuse not to switch - now.

Closing off Microsoft's Patent Options

Patents are boring - but important. They are the chokepoint for much intellectual activity - especially the kind discussed in these pages - so anything that can be done to loosen their grip on the free interchange of ideas is welcome.

Against this background, the announcement by the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that it has "created a partnership with the open source community to ensure that patent examiners have access to all available prior art relating to software code during the patent examination process" is an encouraging step, since software patents are some of the most problematic of all (see Richard Stallman's brilliant explanation of why). However, this is a statement of intent, rather than a concrete move, and it remains to be seen what practical effect it will have on stemming the flood of trivial or downright bad patents being granted by the USPTO.

Meanwhile, the USPTO has upheld Microsoft's patent on the File Allocation Table (FAT) storage technology. This is bad news: it represents both a direct defeat for the open source world, which sought to overturn it, and a sword of Damocles that henceforth will hang over the entire free software movement. The danger is that Microsoft will demand royalties - maybe even "reasonable and non-discriminatory" ones - that will be impossible for free software projects that use the FAT technology to pay.

Update: On the other hand, maybe it's not over yet...(who said patents were boring?)

Update 2: For a view on the USPTO initiative from inside one of the companies helping to make it happen - IBM - see this excellent post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Anyone who's read my Rebel Code will know that he was the man who essentially turned Big Blue onto GNU/Linux. This means that he is someone with his finger on the pulse, and that his blog is well worth following.

11 January 2006

In the Vanguard

What is exciting about this piece in the Nigerian newspaper Vanguard (link from Open Access News), is that it puts all the pieces together so well: how open source and open access relate to intellectual property regimes, AIDS, poverty, ecology and - inevitably - global politics.

As the article concludes:

Open the source code of innovation, and we’ll change the planet.

Truly, the way forward.

Wikipedia, Science and Peer Review

Last week, Wendy Grossman wrote a wise article about how all those making a fuss over Wikipedia's inaccuracies and lack of accountability forget that precisely the same charges were levelled against the Web when it rose to prominence around ten years ago. (Parenthetically, it's interesting to note more generally how Wikipedia is in some sense a Web 2.0 recapitulation of those early Web 1.0 days - a heady if untidy attempt to encompass great swathes of human knowledge).

It seems to me that another story, on BBC News, which considered the fate of the peer review process in the wake of Dr Hwang Woo-suk's faked stem cell papers, is relevant here.

Many of Wikipedia's critics claim that everything would be fine if only it added some rigorous peer review to the process, just like science does when papers are published. But as the BBC item explains, the peer review process employed by Science magazine (where most of Hwang's apparently ground-breaking papers appeared) signally failed to spot that Hwang's papers were frauds (it also explains why, in any case, this is probably asking too much of peer review).

These recent problems with scientific peer review re-inforce Grossman's point about Wikipedia: that we should stop worrying about the inaccuracies and instead learn how to live with them, just as we do for the Web. Far better to develop a critical sense that submits all results - wherever they come from - to a minimum level of scrutiny.

10 January 2006

Blogs and Open Government

The indispensable John Lettice (don't miss his repeated skewering of the UK's idiotic ID card plans) makes a nice connection between blogging - in particular the extraordinary sight of UK Home Office Minister Hazel Blears' blogging - and a more open form of government. Well, potentially, at least....

Gnashing and Wailing

The GNU Project is working on a full-featured, completely free, Flash player, called Gnash. I suppose they had to do it, because for them the problem is the proprietary nature of the main Flash player.

But for me, the problem is Flash, full stop.

Open Source's Big Blunder

It is easy to be fooled by the success of open source software. High-profile applications like Apache and Firefox are routinely cited for their absolute market dominance or relative technological superiority. GNU/Linux is going head-to-head with Microsoft Windows Server, while many are predicting that 2006 will be the year GNU/Linux on the desktop makes its breakthrough (just like 2005 and 2004). The bitter fight over the OpenDocument Format in Massachusetts is an indication that for the first time there is real rival to Microsoft's Office formats, and the Eclipse development platform continues to gain support among coders, corporate IT departments and software companies.

So what's missing from this rosy picture of free software's inexorable rise?

The one area that everyone seems to forget about is education. While it is true that GNU/Linux and open source applications are popular among the more tech-savvy users at university, younger students are exposed almost exclusively to Microsoft's products (except in a few enlightened regions of the world).

The failure of open source to devote significant energies and resources here is a serious problem. As Microsoft learned from Apple, whose initial rise was largely thanks to the widespread use of the Apple ][ in education, if you get them young, you get to keep them (most of them, at least). It is all very well trying to put open source solutions on the desktop, but if the people coming through the educational system have been conditioned to use only Microsoft's products, they will resist any moves to force them to touch anything else. The users become Microsoft's fiercest advocates.

The corollary is that broadening the use of free software in schools will automatically lead to increased use in the home and business markets. Indeed, there is a double benefit if schools routinely deploy programs like Firefox, OpenOffice and GNU/Linux. It ensures that tomorrow's consumers, workers and leaders will be completely comfortable using them, and encourages today's parents to find out more about the software that their children are using at school. One of the huge advantages that open source software enjoys over proprietary applications is that parents can make free copies of a school's software, rather than "borrowing" office copies, say, of Microsoft's products.

Against this background, it is heartening that the UK government body BECTA is carrying out a review of the licensing programme it signed with Microsoft in 2003. Significantly, the report will examine the risks of "lock-in" to Microsoft's products, and "focus on ways to improve access to alternatives to Microsoft products to ensure that there is a freedom of choice". This review therefore takes place in a very different context from the one in which BECTA negotiated its previous deal. In 2003 there was no question about changing supplier - it was taken for granted that Microsoft was the solution: the question was the price reductions that could be won from the company.

As I've noted elsewhere, Microsoft is very adept at bowing to "pressure"” and making "sacrifices" during negotiations. In this case, BECTA could proudly announce that its 2003 deal would save the UK taxpayer £46 million. But for this sum, Microsoft not only retained it grip on the British educational system, but had that stranglehold more or less enshrined in official policy.

It remains to be seen what BECTA comes up with, but its two previous reports in this area, on the use of open source software in schools, and on the possible cost savings of doing so, were notable for their intelligence and even-handedness. This gives some hope that open source may at last be given the opportunity to prove its worth in the British schools.

Helpfully, BECTA has said of its work that "“recognising the increasing relevance of this issue to educators in the EU and indeed globally, an international exchange of views will be facilitated."” This "exchange of views" might provide those living in other areas where there is no significant use of free software in schools with a good opportunity to push for similar reviews in their own countries.

One thing seems certain: if something is not done soon, an entire generation will grow up around the globe that equates the Web with Internet Explorer, email with Outlook, productivity software with Office and computers with Windows. In such a world, open source will at best be marginal, and at worst, irrelevant.

09 January 2006

Closed Source, Open Can of Worms

This is about openness, oh my word, yes.

Great reporting. But rather frightening.

Update: no, the link isn't broken, it's been disappeared. However, you can read the previous stories in this saga here and here - catch them before they, too, mysteriously vanish from the Net....

Google: Friend or Foe?

"Don't Be Evil" is the company motto: but is Google for us or against us?

I'm not talking about justifable concerns that it knows far too much about what interests us - both in terms of the searches we carry out and (if we use Gmail) the correspondence we send and receive. This is a larger issue, and relates to all the major online companies - Microsoft, Yahoo, even Amazon - that mediate and hence participate in much of our lives. What concerns me here is whether Google can be considered a friend of openness.

On the one hand, Google is quite simply the biggest open source company. Its fabled server farm consists of 10,000s/100,000s/1,000,000s (delete as applicable) of GNU/Linux boxes; this means that anyone searching with Google is a GNU/Linux user.

It has a growing list of code that it has open-sourced; it has sponsored budding hackers in its Summer of Code programme; and it keeps on acquiring key open source hackers like Guido van Rossum (inventor of Python) and Ben Goodger, (Firefox lead engineer).

On the other hand, Google's software is heavily weighted towards Microsoft Windows. Programs like Google Earth and Picasa are only available under Windows, and its latest, most ambitious foray, the Google Pack, is again only for Microsoft's operating system. This means that every time Google comes out with some really cool software, it is reinforcing Microsoft's hold on the desktop. Indeed, we are fast approaching the point where the absence of GNU/Linux versions of Google's programs are a major disincentive to adopt an open source desktop.

This dilemma is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, since Google clearly wants to serve the largest desktop market first, while drawing on the amazing price-performance of free software for its own computing platform.

But there is another area where it has the chance to play nice with openness, one that does not require it to come down definitively on one side or the other of the operating system world.

Another Windows-only product, Google Talk, is the subject of a lawsuit alleging patent infringement. However, closer examination of the two patents concerned, Patent Number 5,425,085 - "Least cost routing device for separate connection into phone line" - and Patent Number 5,519,769 - "Method and system for updating a call rating database", suggests that one of the best ways Google could show that it is a friend of both open source and proprietary software is by defending itself vigorously in the hope that the US Patent system might start to be applied as it was originally envisioned, to promote innovation, not as an easy way of extracting money from wealthy companies.

Update 1: Google has come out with a Mac version of Google Earth. It's a start.

Update 2: There are rumours about Google working on its own desktop GNU/Linux. Frankly, I'll believe it when I see it: it's a poor fit with their current portfolio, and the margins are terrible.

Update 3
: Comfortingly, these rumours have now been scotched.

07 January 2006

Not Your Father's/Mother's Tripos

At Cambridge University, the examinations are known as the Tripos - a reference, it is thought, to the three-legged wooden stool that candidates originally sat on during their orals.

Now the P2P Foundation has come up with another "three-legged stool", one of whose legs (number 2: open "everything") is not a million miles from the page you are reading. Great minds, etc.

A Smidgeon Too Open, Perhaps

I'm all in favour of openness, but maybe this is taking things a little too far....

More seriously, it does show the tension between openness and privacy - and how a balance needs to be struck in some cases. Here, though, there seems to be no possible justification for exposing mobile 'phone users in this way - sorry, "greed is good" doesn't cut it.

Code is Law, Code is Politics

As Lawrence Lessig famously noted, Code is Law. Which means that Code is Politics, too, since laws are drawn up by politicians. But the intimate relationship between code and politics is becoming manifest in a rather different context (pity about the yellow on black text).

The issue here is about the software used in voting machines. Since, one day, all voting will be carried with such machines (unless we decide to go back to using ostraca), now is the time to consider why free access to the code that runs them is indispensable for political transparency.

It comes down to this: if you are dealing with a black box, you can have absolutely no faith in the results it produces. It might just make them up or - worse - change them subtly, or perhaps be pre-programmed to crash if a particular party gets too many votes, requiring a complete re-run, with knock-on effects on voting patterns.

If you have the source code you can run it and examine what it does with various voting inputs, and check that it has no nefarious sub-routines. However, even this is not enough for full confidence in the voting machine: paper audits are also indispensable for checking on the consistency of the outputs, and allowing for the ultimate fall-back - counting by hand.

Still, this is a clear instance of where, in a literal rather than metaphorical sense, closed source jeopardises the very basis of democracy. Looks like RMS was right.

06 January 2006

The BMJ Evolves towards... the Dark Side

The British Medical Journal is a fine institution, with a long and glorious history of publishing important medical research. On top of that it was enlightened, allowing mere members of the public (like me) to read all of its content through an open access policy that placed it at the vanguard of scientific publishing.

No more.

An editorial claims that "The BMJ is evolving". As far as I can tell from information on the site (not to mention the sign-in page I meet at the above address), it seems to be evolving in precisely the opposite direction to everyone else, by reducing the amount of its content that is freely available.

More and more scientific journals recognise the virtues of open access, both in terms of efficiency (the dissemination of knowledge and the building of scientists' reputations) and ethics (since the general public pays through taxes for most published research). A full and very clear explanation of both the why and the how of open access can be found here.

Update: Miraculously, the editorial mentioned above now seems to be available to hoi polloi....

05 January 2006

Open Data - Good; Open Access - Bad?

Great story in Nature about data mashups - the mixing together of data drawn from disparate sources to create a sum greater than the parts.

This approach is not new: it lies at the heart of open source software - where chunks of code are drawn from the specialised databases known as hackers' brains and stitched together - and open genomics. Indeed, bioinformatics represents a kind of apotheosis of the mashup - see, for example, the way in which data from many researchers is pulled together in a genome browser like Ensembl.

Data mashups are more recent, and have started to gain popularity thanks to Google Earth. This provides a useful and conceptually simple scaffolding for other data to be brought together and displayed - like Nature's own avian flu mashup.

A pity, then, that this paean to the virtues of open data is not itself freely available under an open access licence. (For the benighted, the indispensable Open Access News has a long quotation that conveys the essence.)

He Gets It - But Not What You Think

The head of Mozilla in Europe, Tristan Nitot, has an interesting post about the French Gendarmerie National switching to both Firefox and Thunderbird. But the real story is not the obvious one of another Firefox and Thunderbird victory. After all, Firefox in particular benefits from a typical virtuous circle: the more people who use it, the greater the incentive to follow suit as more sites start adopting open Web standards.

The real kicker comes right at the end of the quotation from an interview with the man in charge of the move, Général Brachet:

Our first goal is to migrate all the upper layers of the workstation to Open Source Software to be independent of the Operating System.

Yes, he really gets it.

The real breakthrough for GNU/Linux on the business desktop will come from the combined power of the Fab Free Three: Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Once users are familiar with these programs on Windows, they will have no problem switching to GNU/Linux, since the applications - which are where they spend the vast majority of their computing time - are the same.

And just as private use of Microsoft's Office suite is largely driven by its dominance of businesses (helped by some "borrowing" of work copies to use at home), so GNU/Linux among general users will be propelled by its increasing penetration of the business market, not vice-versa.

We'll know when that is happening once large numbers of games that are currently Windows-only start appearing in GNU/Linux versions. Their absence remains probably the biggest single obstacle to converting the average person on the Clapham Omnibus to a totally open source solution. Children are Microsoft's secret weapon here. The rise of third generation consoles will also help by providing another way of satisfying the gaming urge in the Window-less family.

03 January 2006

Unhappy New Year, Tibet

Although open access usually refers to journal papers, there are an increasing number of books freely available too, as a previous post noted. One I came across recently is a good example, because it lies at the opposite end of the open access spectrum from the latest research reports.

As its title - "Handbook of Proto-Tibeto-Burman: System and Philosophy of Sino-Tibetan Reconstruction" - suggests, this is one of those "work of lifetime" books that both sums up what is currently known, and also provides as starting-poing for future directions.

It is really quite extraordinary - even for someone like me who has no Tibetan or Burman. In fact the book, which is a svelte 3.2 Mb PDF file, can be appreciated by anyone simply as a hermetic artefact. Scrolling through the 805 pages (yes, you read correctly - it really is one of those awe-inspiring tomes) you encounter a cloud of almost completely-inscrutable signs.

It can also be appreciated as poetry, dealing as it does with the relationships between several hundred languages in the Tibeto-Burman family with names like Bal-brang, Jingpho-Nung-Luish, Khualsim, Loloish, Nruanghmei, Ugong and Yakkhaba.

And anyone can appreciate the importance of this book, laid out in its introduction:

The great Sino-Tibetan language family, comprising Chinese on the one hand and Tibeto-Burman (TB) on the other, is comparable in time-depth and internal diversity to Indo-European, and equally important in the context of world civilization. The overwhelming cultural and numerical predominance of Chinese is counterbalanced by the sheer number of languages (some 250-300) in the TB branch.

But as well as providing clues to the origins of Chinese, whose "cultural predominance" grows by the day, this wonderful e-book is also a major contribution to the understanding of the Tibetan language, almost totally ignored in the West, along with its people.

This fact is particularly regrettable at the moment. It appears that China has decided to crackdown on monks in Lhasa who remain steadfast in their allegiance to the exiled Dalai Lama. This is but the latest episode in China's appalling treatment of Tibet after its invasion of that country in 1949. In addition to its continuing abuse of human rights, Chinese authorities have embarked on what the Government of Tibet in Exile terms "ecocide": the reckless and systematic destruction of Tibet's environment. One of the ironies of this is that China too is suffering the consequences of this.

The only consolation is that however brutal China's treatment of Tibet itself becomes, Tibetan culture will live on. As well as a considerable number of Tibetans living in exile around the world (chiefly in India) who keep the flame alive, there are now a number of projects, some major international collaborations, to digitise the unique Tibetan cultural heritage.

Once again, the world of bits offers a partial counterbalance to some of the terrible losses taking place in the world of atoms.